As data volume and processing requirements increase, computing clusters grow in size and, hence, inter-server communication requirements correspondingly increase. Traditional Ethernet and other network-based fabrics, such as InfiniBand, have full-fledged management support. However, the performance, cost, and power overheads can be significant. On the other hand, recent work on using a motherboard-level I/O-interconnect, such as PCIe, as a high-speed network fabric shows promising performance and energy efficiency results, but also reveals challenges in managing such high-speed I/O-interconnect based networks. For example, a key challenge is for such I/O-interconnects to support advanced management features such as fault tolerance, end-to-end flow control, and quality-of-service (QoS). These features are supported by traditional networks such as Ethernet, but not by I/O-interconnects such as PCIe mainly because such features are often expensive for I/O-interconnects.